In 2020, as COVID-19 raged on and the world ground to a halt, Erin McGoff sat in her 400-square-foot Brooklyn apartment and fretted. Her flourishing career in the film industry—the very thing that brought her to New York City in the first place—suddenly seemed in jeopardy. Editing and directing work all but dried up once the pandemic hit; it was like the entire industry was at a standstill.
So, feeling stressed in the face of unprecedented uncertainty, she did what every other millennial did.
“I downloaded TikTok,” McGoff says with a laugh.
For a while after downloading the app, she just watched, in awe of the algorithm’s ability to launch short-form videos in front of millions of viewers. “2020 was kind of an introspective year for everybody, [and] I was thinking about—there was so much awfulness going on around me, I just wanted to think about how I could make the world a little bit better,” she tells SUCCESS. “I posted a few videos that were just pieces of advice that I wish I had when I was younger and starting out, and people just loved it.”
A reluctant influencer
But as Advice With Erin was taking off, McGoff resisted going the influencer route. She took a position at National Geographic, where she worked full-time for two years, even as her online following swelled.
Eventually though, her internet success became too much to ignore. “I was getting so many messages from people telling me how my advice was completely changing their life and helping them make more money and advocate for themselves,” she recalls. “It just was so fulfilling and rewarding.” She gave in and quit her Nat Geo job to start making video content full time.
Today, McGoff’s Advice With Erin series is huge. In addition to her nearly 3 million TikTok followers, she has more than 2 million people following along on Instagram and another 870,000-plus subscribers on YouTube. Her website is full of toolkits and quizzes, and she offers workshops and office hours for folks who want more individualized coaching and advice.
Often, career advice from experts can seem vague or dry, McGoff says—or depending on your industry—hard to come by or not applicable to your specific situation. “It’s squishy advice,” she says.
McGoff’s advice, on the other hand, tends to be hyper-specific, like help for followers who ask for assistance writing a resume as a retail worker or an administrative assistant. Need tips on gracefully setting boundaries at work? She’s got ‘em. Looking for do’s and don’ts for delivering bad news? Advice With Erin has you covered. Or maybe you find yourself floundering for words when you’re waiting for another person to join a Zoom call? Yep, McGoff has advice for that, too. She’ll even walk you through canceling your gym membership.
From documentary films to content creation
McGoff had wanted to work in the film industry ever since she was a little girl; she graduated with a film degree from American University, got a Pulitzer Center fellowship and released her first feature documentary, This Little Land of Mines, to acclaim in 2019. But over the years, she’s come to see that content creation and documentary filmmaking are almost two sides of the same coin. She’s trained to do research, and she knows how to make videos—ideally, videos that are really interesting to the viewer. She’s also begun to realize that, despite her initial hesitancy, the work she’s doing to help young people with their careers is important.
“The kids who grew up in the most privileged environments have the most access, and the kids who need a hand up, they don’t even know what questions to ask,” she explains. “My overall goal in my career was just to make a really positive impact in the world, and I thought documentary was the way I was going to do that.… But then I realized that TikTok was actually a much more impactful and less gatekeep-y way of doing it. The film industry is not the best place to try and make an impact on the world.”
Her time in the industry did help lay the groundwork for some of her earliest advice videos, which were specific to careers in film, but her followers kept clamoring for more general help. These days, in addition to relying on her own experience, she consults with other career content creators for advice; she’s also a voracious reader of career-related newsletters and follows news outlets like The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, MarketWatch, The Economist and CNBC.
And McGoff isn’t stopping there. In 2024, she launched a YouTube show called No One Knows What They’re Doing, where she invites guest experts to speak on an even wider range of topics, from making friends as an adult to the pros and cons of moving to Europe as an American. She’s currently hard at work on a book (the topic is currently secret), and she’s always thinking about tools to add to her website or new ways to reach those who need career guidance.
“I have dreams of hosting these adult job fairs where people can come and learn about new careers… but you know, one thing at a time,” she chuckles.
The current job market
McGoff’s shift to career advice guru happened to take place at an opportune time, when lots of people were as uncertain about their futures as she was.
“The pandemic flipped the world upside-down for a hot second, and the past couple years we’ve been experiencing a recalibration,” she says. “A lot of people are really struggling to get jobs, or they’re getting laid off, or there’s whole industries that have massive demand and they can’t find enough workers.”
Add in the sudden ubiquity of AI, as well as the proliferation of the applicant tracking systems companies use to aid in the recruiting process, and it’s no wonder so many people come to her with questions about their resumes, interview skills or workplace conflicts.
“It can be really hard to articulate yourself, and that’s why I’m so passionate about making my content. [There are] so many great people who simply don’t… have the awesome writing skills, or they don’t have the awesome articulation skills, and it’s actually holding them back from getting a great job,” she says.
McGoff’s advice for Gen X, Gen Z and everyone else
When it comes to emerging and ongoing workplace trends, there are a few things McGoff sees. On the worker side, employees are still looking for more of a work-life balance: “They’re prioritizing their time over actually how much money they’re making.” On the company side, she finds that hiring managers are increasingly looking for different things than before. “Companies are absolutely looking for what you can do over where you’ve worked and what degrees you have.”
One thing she’s seeing a lot of in her DMs at the moment is questions and concerns regarding ageism, especially as members of Gen X enter their 50s and 60s.
“Because again, that skills over degrees thing—Gen X was a generation that was able to fly on their degrees, and really lean on [them],” she explains. “Now, companies are like, ‘Actually we don’t care about those as much. If they’re not a legal requirement, we want to know what you can do.’”
For Gen Z, meanwhile, it’s all about the side hustles. “I think the future is going to be entrepreneurship, and I think we’re going to see less workers … we’re going to see more individuals doing their own things,” McGoff says.
But her biggest piece of career advice is one that applies for folks of all generations—find what makes you happy, and do that.
From quiet quitting to lazy girl jobs to bare minimum Monday, there are always going to be buzzy, catchphrase-y, viral work trends. McGoff says that her advice is to determine what resonates with you—what aligns with your interests and your goals—and don’t worry about the rest.
“Figure out what’s really important to you—what you want out of life, not what your parents want, or what your friends are doing or what you think is right or cool to do,” she says. “Because at the end of the day, if you’re not doing something that makes you happy, you’re never going to find a sense of happiness, no matter how much you achieve or how much money you make.”
“You’ve gotta do what makes you happy,” McGoff concludes. “I know it sounds like a Disney Channel original movie, but they were right.”
Photo by Brendan Wixted/courtesy of Erin McGoff
